putting muscles to ragdolls

Its been veeery long since I try to code anything, I forgot quite a bit, anyway I have a formidabile idea I hope I'll find the time to work on: about 3 months ago I learned how to do a "ragdoll" chain, which is pretty neat. But I didnt want to have only a ragdoll, I wanted to have "muscles", "elastic tensions" between the rings of the chain, to keep them somewhat in position. Finally I got that!! (the Math looks easy, but to manage to get it right is a PAIN!!!!, im not using libraries)

The idea now is to make a ragg-doll 2D beatem'up (with very simple characters made by about 15 "pieces") completely dynamic (i.e. no pre-made moves- position, but everything based on the moving "muscles" and let the ragg-doll physics create the movement). The tricky part is that you somehow should have a balance between ragdollness (which looks very cool) and "elastic tensions" (if the character does not have enough elastic tension he wont manage to stand up straight, he will drop dead like a ragdoll), which however make the movement more rigid. I also saw an awesome little game called ragdoll matrix, where the player can abolish gravity for some time, so the ragdollness is visible in all its beauty. I plan to do something like that!

Do you know examples of rag-doll+elastic tensions, possibly in modelling a man?

Najdorf Wrote:Do you know examples of rag-doll+elastic tensions, possibly in modelling a man?

Alas, I do not. Ragdolls were actually something I was thinking about exploring in the near future. Mostly a research project, but towards something that could be usable in a future game. Which resources have you been using to learn about ragdolls? I'm sure I could find a few through google, but I was wondering if you knew of any good ones off-hand.

David Rosen's ragdolls are wicked cool. I wish he'd write a tutorial or something on how he does that. It may not be so easy to see it in the bunny game, but I saw some movies of the character animator and it was incredible!

Yeah ragdoll is fun to play with. I'm sorry I dont know about good resources, I'm trying to "discover" it by myself: the basic thing that is the core of ragdoll is (at least in my opinion, lol!) is the concept of a chain. If you manage to do a good simulator of a chain you have understood the basics: The trick to the algorithm is to let the parts of the chain move "freely", then collapse the joints back together through iterated adjustments (at least that's how I figured it, might be wrong lol!). In a week I should have this model of a man (made by 15 balls, lol).

The nasty thing is that you can get stuck on 10 lines of math for hours... I' m coding at the speed of a tortoise...

If you want functional characters, you have to do a mocap/ragdoll hybrid. Simply adding muscles to the ragdoll won't produce any kind of good results. I believe there are GDC papers on how to do this, but I don't have them at the ready. Check GDC 2003 and 2004 coverage.